Slide Show

Two Sides of Sochi

Photographs by Misha Friedman

Introduction by Genevieve Fussell

Tonight marks the end of the twenty-second Winter Games, one of the most controversial and expensive Olympics in recent history. The photographer Misha Friedman, who travelled to Sochi, Russia, for the Games, told me that the host town felt “like two completely different places.” When he first arrived in Sochi, ten days before the opening ceremony, Friedman found a harried atmosphere, as organizers and officials rushed to finish preparations. Security was tight: nervous police officers, some armed with sniper rifles, were on patrol among colorful banners and souvenir shops, and surveillance blimps floated overhead. By the time Friedman left, however, midway through the Games, the militarized feeling had dissipated among the throngs of fans, media, and athletes. The juxtaposition of these two very different experiences stands, for Friedman, as a metaphor of modern Russia. “There is a divide between the people who criticize the current regime and the people who just accept it—people who don’t care and are very much O.K. with the system.”

At one point during the assignment, Friedman e-mailed me a link to Leonard Cohen’s song “Everybody Knows”: “Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That’s how it goes / Everybody knows.” The song made for a perfect summation, he suggested, of the prevailing sentiment among Olympic spectators. Despite the troubling politics surrounding the Games, many Russians have been happy to enjoy the show. In Sochi and across Russia, everybody knows.